by Anne Edwards
Judy could not have perceived it at the time, but her record run at the Palace had already made her a legend. The resurgent star now found herself with a frenzied following. Scalpers were getting $100 a pair for tickets to the opening at the Los Angeles Philharmonic Auditorium, and all seats were sold out to the premiere performance weeks before April 26, the scheduled date. Opening night was a replay of the Palace opening—wild applause and shouts of Bravo! rang through the huge old hall— and the engagement was sold out for the entirety of its four-week run.
There was nothing Hollywood despised more than failure, and nothing it venerated more than popular success. Having grown up in this selfsame society, Judy was geared to its values. Each day she rose with the terrible anxiety that that night the show would fail and Hollywood shake its success-oriented head. “Well, we were right,” she was afraid people would say. She also began to question the meaning of her concert success, for Hollywood people were fairly contemptuous of any medium through which only scant thousands could be reached. Their power remained in packaging for millions; and among themselves they cast doubts that Judy, looking fat and matronly, would have succeeded without the power of film magnetism that they had invested in her. The whispers were not kept in private corridors, and so their innuendos came back to whistle like a stubborn wind beneath her dressing-room door.
Even Luft’s encouragement and Liza’s proximity could not ease the rumblings of anxiety that she was beginning to experience. No sooner had she arrived in Hollywood than she began to push to leave it. Luft was working on a San Francisco appearance to follow, and that gave her something concrete to look to.
Her record Judy at the Palace (Copyright 1951, Decca Records, Inc.) had just been released and was selling extremely well, and she had signed a five-year contract with RCA Victor Records. There was no reason for her to feel insecure—but nonetheless, she did. Her final decree of divorce came through before she completed her Los Angeles appearance. She was a free woman. To Judy that meant only that she was now free to marry the man she loved.
On June 11, 1952, Judy took one day away from her San Francisco concert appearance at the Curran Theatre and she and Luft were married in a simple, five-minute ceremony at the Hollister, California, ranch of a wealthy friend. That night Judy was back performing at the Curran. It was a preview of what their married life was to be like.
Only hours after the ceremony Luft was sued by Lynn Bari, claiming that Judy had earned $750,000 in 1951 and that Luft, as her manager, had received a large portion of it. Miss Bari asked the court to raise Luft’s $200 monthly support payments to their son to $500. Judge Burke in Superior Court in Hollywood ordered that the amount of $400 monthly be paid over.
Their court problems did not end there. Ethel—angry, pressed by her own fears and financial needs—now went to court to claim nonsupport from her “high-salaried” daughter. Judy was profoundly disturbed and confused. In the end, incensed that Ethel would trot their differences out into public and into court, she stood her ground, declaring that her mother was a capable piano and singing teacher, having instructed her, and was qualified to run a movie theater as well. She then had records produced to show what moneys had been paid to Ethel in the past. Ethel’s case fell through. A greater estrangement was created between mother and daughter.
It did not help that on July 19, Ethel “bared her soul” to columnist Sheilah Graham in a coast-to-coast interview. “Judy has been selfish all her life,” she declared. “That’s my fault. I made it too easy for her. She worked, but that’s all she ever wanted, to be an actress. She never said, ‘I want to be kind or loved,’ only ‘I want to be famous.’ ” She added that she wanted nothing further from Judy and that she wished the press would forget her as Judy most obviously had done.
Ethel then took a $60-a-week job at Douglas Aircraft, working on the assembly line, and immediately confided this news to a few of her friends who happened to be members of the press.
Judy was pregnant and had been since her San Francisco concert. In the advanced stages of the pregnancy she took very sick. She was swollen with edema and dangerously overweight. Luft was seldom at home, his twenty-four-hour-a-day supervision ending with her inability to appear onstage. The honeymoon was over. Judy has said, “From the beginning Sid and I weren’t happy. I don’t know why. I really don’t. For me it was work, work, work; and then I didn’t see much of Sid. He was always dashing off to places lining up my appearances. I wasn’t made any happier looking into mirrors seeing myself balloon out of shape from liquids trapped in my body.”
The doctors claimed her condition was caused by a metabolic imbalance and that the weight was, indeed, liquid trapped in her body. New fears set in: she would lose Sid; she would lose the baby; her concert career was over—having been only a flash in her life; she would die in delivery. (There was still the painful and frightening remembrance of Liza’s birth.)
On December 8, 1952, she gave birth to a little girl. They named her Lorna. The child was healthy and beautiful, and Judy seemed to feel renewed and happy. It was to be the one bright and happy spot in her life for quite a while; for on January 5, 1953, less than four weeks later, Ethel fell dead in the parking lot of Douglas Aircraft of a heart seizure that had occurred at seven-thirty in the morning. She was discovered between two parked cars on her hands and knees, as though desperately trying to crawl for help.
Judy collapsed. It was not one of those convenient “collapses” famous stars have in order to avoid the press. She was not hiding under a bed so that she did not have to answer questions—though to be sure, the whole sordid, unsavory story of Judy’s “abandonment” of Ethel in these last days of dire circumstances was rehashed, in the press. Forgotten was the Judge’s just decree after studying all the evidence: that Judy not pay Ethel support. It made a far more dramatic story for the press to ignore that.
The irony, of course, was that Judy had been supporting her mother since she had been a very small child. All their lives their roles had been reversed in that respect. And had Ethel been cautious with the money Judy gave her, neither of them need ever have had financial insecurities. The further irony was that only in the last six months of Ethel’s life had Judy withdrawn monthly support, having maintained Ethel at times when she herself was deeply in debt. Actually, Ethel had more security than Judy, having received cash for a theater she and Gilmore had owned in Dallas and having a small income from investments made with Judy’s early earnings.
It is hard to understand why, if Ethel felt she must work, she chose a factory assembly-line job when there were many more lucrative jobs open to her. She could certainly have secured a position in publicity, costuming (she was still an expert seamstress), theater management, booking, or, as previously mentioned, as a piano teacher or coach. She also had a large family whom she, through Judy’s bounty, had been very good to all the years of Judy’s career and whom she certainly could have called on had she truly been in need.
The court suit for support, then, appears to have been a vituperative action initiated in anger and meant to censure or embarrass Judy on one hand and on the other, threaten Judy— as the old hotel-room-desertion act had once done—into complying with Ethel’s will. In short, it was a form of emotional blackmail.
But Judy’s feelings regarding Ethel were too deep-rooted and too complex to permit her to see anything clearly. Once more she had “misbehaved,” causing grievous results, and there was no longer any way to get Ethel to forgive her. It should not have mattered. But it did. For the rest of Judy’s life it mattered.
Somehow she managed to fly to the funeral, though doing so was entirely against the doctor’s orders. Midway through the service she broke down. Luft held her up until the end. Then, leaning heavily on him and another friend, Judy managed to make it to the car. Immediately afterward, she went to pieces and took to her bed. It was the beginning of a two-year-long relapse—the worst breakdown she had suffered or would suffer in her life. Any chance she and Luft might h
ave had of a successful marriage appears to have been snuffed out during this period.
It was a lonely time and a monotonous time. She seemed to have been beaten back and deserted by the world. Luft was constantly away from home on business trips. Expecting the initial bonanza of her concert appearances to go on, he had not protected the huge sums she had made from the Palladium, the Palace, the Philharmonic, or the Curran. Her 1951 and 1952 income tax had gone unpaid, and as those had been peak years, the tax was astronomical—over $300,000. Once more she was immersed in debt, and in her present condition she could not imagine how she could ever rise above it. Her morale was never lower; and to add to this, whenever Luft was home, it seemed he had come there to appear in court to receive scoldings from a judge for not paying child support or alimony to Lynn Bari.
Luft began to press her to pull herself together so that she could work. Whatever his true motives might have been, the result did at least get Judy to her feet. She could not without returning once more to the pills, the crash diets. Luft now believed Judy should return to films in a package that they owned and in a film of which he would be the producer. If successful, it would establish him as a film producer and mean he could take over the family’s support. It was something to grab hold of for Judy. The immediate search for a film property began.
Back in the early 1940’s, Judy had done a great many radio shows. In January, 1941, she had appeared on the CBS Silver Theatre program in Love’s New Sweet Song, for which she wrote the original script that True Boardman adapted for presentation. In December, 1942, she had starred on radio with Walter Pidgeon and Adolphe Menjou in the CBS Lux Radio Theatre adaptation of A Star Is Born. At the time she had felt it was the finest performance she had given, and it had led to her first yearnings to play a full-fledged dramatic role. She had, in fact, discussed the idea of her doing a remake of A Star Is Born for the studio at that time but was told a radio appearance was one thing, a film role quite another. She was too young and the image all wrong. In a way, though, thanks to the seed that performance had planted in her head, it had led to her starring in The Clock. Now it all came back to her.
If she was to do an independent film—why not a remake of A Star Is Born? Something must have clicked in Luft’s promotional mind. Instinct probably told him the property was right for Judy, but that it had to be a musical version. With that decision, he set about the first phases of getting such a tremendous production into operation.
27Up to the time of the publication of this book, Sid Luft has had only two films under his production aegis. Both were produced in the same year (1954) and at the same studio (Warner’s).
One film was the brilliant musical version of A Star Is Born directed by George Cukor, starring Judy Garland and James Mason. The other was a substandard Western entitled The Bounty Hunters, which starred Randolph Scott and was directed by André de Toth.
Directed by William Wellman, and starring Fredric March and Janet Gaynor, the original A Star Is Born had been a Hollywood classic and one of the film industry’s top grossers.
If it was Luft’s decision to petition George Cukor to direct this version with Judy, then, indeed, his contribution to the final product is insured. Cukor’s cinema is a subjective cinema, consistently exhibiting his exquisite taste and style. He is never fearful of a commitment and he is masterly in his direction of women. By 1954 he had already directed Katharine Hepburn in A Bill of Divorcement, Little Women, Sylvia Scarlet, Holiday, The Philadelphia Story, Adam’s Rib, and Pat and Mike (a very comforting knowledge to Judy); Garbo in Camille; Norma Shearer in Romeo and Juliet; Crawford in Susan and God and A Woman’s Face; Bergman in Gaslight; Jean Simmons in The Actress; and Judy Holliday in Born Yesterday.
Never having directed a musical (since, he has contributed Les Girls, Let’s Make Love, and My Fair Lady to that form), Cukor was hesitant about accepting the assignment. The Moss Hart script, however, was a literate and moving adaptation of the original (by Dorothy Parker, Alan Campbell, Robert Carson, and Wellman); and it dealt with actors, a subject that holds a large attraction to Cukor, who had used it in many films to very good advantage (i.e., The Royal Family on Broadway, Sylvia Scarlet, The Actress, Dinner at Eight, Les Girls, A Star Is Born, Let’s Make Love, and Heller in Pink Tights).
In A Star Is Born, Judy was once again to play a girl named Esther. Esther had also been the name of the character she portrayed in Meet Me in St. Louis—certainly her best performance in her Metro years. The coincidence appeared to be a good omen. The story dealt with the love affair and marriage of an aging, alcoholic movie star (Norman Maine) and the young woman (Esther Blodgett) who, in their first encounter, saves him from making a drunken spectacle of himself before an audience of his own peers. Later Maine discovers Esther has a voice with a quality of true greatness and helps her in her own climb to the top of film stardom, renaming her Vicki Lester. But as she ascends, he slips badly—drinking so heavily he has to be institutionalized. Vicki decides that to save Maine she has to give up her own career. Overhearing this decree, Maine martyrs himself and frees her by walking out of their elegant Malibu Beach house and drowning himself, leaving Vicki to continue her ascent to stardom.
The film was an important one for Judy in more meaningful ways than as a career vehicle. The story, which twelve years before had intrigued her as a dramatic opportunity, now bore a deep relationship to her own life. The more she studied the script, the more painful, the more impossible it became for her to chance losing it. The peregrinations of her mind might seem difficult to map but not in the final analysis to understand, for the script enabled Judy to play out two of her own fears and fantasies. She was at one time both Norman Maine—the star who in a desperate need for love devoured all those around him—and the great star’s “lover,” giving completely, unselfishly, and with complete understanding. She had great compassion for the character of Maine—the great star who was alternately being called a has-been and then having to fight the terror of one new comeback after another; the great star who could not fight his greater weakness (alcohol) and so allowed it to become his excuse, his crutch, and in the end, his true executioner. By playing Vicki Lester (Esther Blodgett) she was able to show the world how self-sacrificing love must be if one does love such a star. In the melodramatic but moving last part of the film Norman Maine commits suicide to save those he loved. It was a romantic notion, but from that point forward in her life Judy would consider that possibility many times.
She had been off the stage two years, away from films four years; and though her last film, Summer Stock, had been a success and her last concert a smash hit, the press now treated her as a has-been and she had suffered the poorest public relations. It had started with Ethel’s interviews; and had been compounded by Ethel’s court case and untimely death. But Judy’s public image seemed smashed beyond repair more by the airing of all her financial woes than by anything else. She did, indeed, appear a spoiled, unthinking, irresponsible woman. She had made more money in one year than any newspaper reporter could have dreamed of making in a lifetime, and she had spent it foolishly—and not paid her taxes—which reporters most assuredly had to do each year. Edema had given her a bloated, drunken look. It was insinuated that Judy Garland was an alcoholic and that the reason she had not appeared in two years was that no management would risk a drunken performance.
The fears, the fantasies—they were a Garland pattern; and they were the basis of Norman Maine’s character and of Judy’s strong identification with that role. They were the impetus that gave her own role such force, poignancy, and urgency. She had to convey to the world how much Norman Maine must be loved and accepted. She had to make the public understand how lonely and cold it was at the top. In essence, her stunning performance of Vicki Lester (Esther Blodgett) was a closing plea before a worldwide audience for her own defense.
Cary Grant was initially set to play Norman Maine. It was fortunate for the end product of the film that his own good sense caused him to withdra
w. It would have been unreal for an audience to believe that Grant—the suave, million-dollar movie idol who was known to be a health nut—could be an alcoholic has-been. Ray Milland had done it in The Lost Weekend, but Milland’s screen image had not been so well established as had Grant’s. James Mason was cast. It was a brilliant and successful choice. Mason’s portrayal stands out as one of his best in a career filled with great performances.
In all her Metro years Judy had never been given the opportunity to submerge herself completely in a role, for no part had demanded that of her. She had been able to rely on a simple understanding of the character she might be playing (for they were never deep or complex). By interpreting the character with a basic honesty and being able to graft her own personality onto that character, she had been totally believable even in the most inane of roles. Vicki Lester was her first true challenge as an actress. (The Clock had been a departure, and Meet Me in St. Louis, sensitive; but neither performance had demanded so much of her.) Not only was the role complex, but her own need to be Vicki Lester and to convince her audience of the honesty of Vicki Lester’s great love and of the sincerity of her intention was of a very complex nature.
Norman Mailer, in Marilyn, attempting to throw light on that star’s ability to become a character she was playing, states:
In the depths of the most merry and roistering moments an actor can have on stage there is still the far-off wail of the ghoul. For a good actor is a species of necrophile—he makes contact with the character he is playing, inhabits a role the way a ghoul invests a body. Indeed, if the role is great enough, the actor must proceed through a series of preparatory acts not unrelated to magical acts of concentration, ritual, and invocation.
